Larry Phillips, the East German-style commissar of the King County Politburo, is untroubled by a rudderless elections department [Phillips] had confidence in the elections office because it has successfully conducted several elections since the 2004 governor's election In Phillips 'world, apparently, a successful election is one where dozens or hundreds of ballots disappear.

Soviet é migr é Vladimir Bukovsky called the notion of Politburo policy struggle " a simplification based on the ' mirror-image ' fallacy so common in the West, " but it was not until the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that Sovietologists learned how right he was.

A fortnight ago President Hu Jintao called his Politburo together to discuss maintaining the Communist Party's "superior morality" and "establishing a clean government by eliminating corruption", according to Xinhua.